The Holiday Week

Like many places the week between Christmas and New Years is rather laid back on the refuge, at least for the staff. Both Dan and Ann, the biologists here and the folks we volunteer for, were off for the week and Paula, who we help with the quail, didn't need us to come over on Christmas or New Years Day. This didn't mean that we took the week off. In fact, our schedule was rather fractured with assignments of two of our usual off days.

On the day after Christmas, there was a scheduled Brown Canyon public hike. We'd helped out on one of these twice-a-month hikes before and we volunteered to help on this one. Brown Canyon is very beautiful and the hike is great fun. It is unlike the rest of the refuge and has good birding as well as a hike up to the Baboquivari Wilderness. The first hike was a full house, twelve people plus us hike guides. This one was just the opposite end of the spectrum—it had one guest hiker and three staff. It was supposed to have four but the others cancelled at the last minute.

It didn't stop us though and it was a nice day in the canyon. Our one hiker turned out to be a retired interpretive ranger supervisor for Parks Canada, the Canadian National Park system. It was almost a bit intimidating, knowing that we were guiding an expert in the type of program we were presenting. But we needn't have been as she was quite nice and admitted that she was unfamiliar with the flora and fauna of the Southwest. She had been chief of interpretation at the Cape Breton Highlands National Park, quite different from our area. Her only recommendation was that we should move along a little more quickly and be shorter in time as it was a fairly long hike. This, unfortunately, would be hard to do as the highlight of the hike is at its turn around point, a natural stone arch. But we had a good time.

After taking Sunday for our weekly trip into Tucson for groceries (no stopping at the Dodge Dealer, maybe no going back either), we were back in Brown Canyon on Monday. A group of students from a Desert Museum program called Earth Ambassadors were going to be staying over at the Environmental Education Center in the canyon for a couple of nights and we took them up to the EEC and showed them all the systems, etc. They stopped at the Visitor Center first for a showing of the refuge video and to ask questions about the refuge.

It was an interesting trip driving into the canyon as I don't think they realized how far in they had to go nor how rough the road is. We had to stop on the way in to allow a covey of Montezuma Quail to cross the road. These quail are usually pretty shy, so this was quite a good view as they took their time moving across the road. The next surprise was arriving at the EEC and finding another car there. It turned out to be two of the local volunteers who had come up to prepare for another meeting this week by the local refuge "Friends" group. They didn't know that there was a group coming to stay.

We got there just in time. Their preparation included setting "Mouse Bombs" and we'd arrived just before they got a chance to do this. That would have been a disaster as it probably would have made the building uninhabitable for the students.

After dropping the students off, who were most impressed that they would have actual bedrooms and real beds, we continued up the canyon a short distance to pick some more Four-wing Saltbush seed. We'd found a patch just beyond the EEC during the Saturday hike and wanted to get the seed before the weather turned.

And turn it did—Tuesday it snowed. We don't know what the weather in the canyon was like, but we spent most of the day in Speedy and took the photos that appeared in the previous Speedy Journal entry. Things change quickly here and after the snow stopped, the weather cleared and the snow was virtually all gone by sunset.

We were back on our normal volunteer schedule for Wednesday and Thursday. I did some digitizing of refuge fence map data on Wednesday morning and Ellen and I went down to the road along the border in the afternoon. She along with Rob and Reta had found Four-wing Saltbush there last week and we went to see if there was any more. We found several patches with bushes and spent four hours filling trash bags with seed.

Thursday was New Year's Eve as well. We grilled planked salmon for dinner and had stopped in Arivaca after our hydrology readings to buy ice cream. The only small containers were chocolate but that was okay as we topped it with espresso dulce de leche and toasted pine nuts. We celebrated by connecting with our friends at the annual party in Hull using Skype. It was bittersweet connecting with our friends; great to "see" them but missing them and our traditional party. We turned in by midnight Eastern Time as we were pretty beat from seed collection.

I don't think we did anything besides take a local bird walk on New Year's Day. Our first bird of the year was a Great Horned Owl who seemed to be perched on top of Speedy hooting away at 5 AM. Saturday was similar, but Ellen was busy cooking. She baked oatmeal walnut squares to take along on the Sunday bird count and made chicken-white bean chile as our contribution to dinner.

We were having a potluck dinner with the other volunteers in the evening along with Bonnie, the Buenos Aires Christmas Bird Count (CBC) Compiler. Bonnie was the Wildlife Refuge Specialist before Dan and retired a couple of years ago, but she has been leading the CBC for years and continues to do so. She, as well as Ron and Reta, were staying over in the Outpost trailers before the count.

Sunday was the annual Audubon CBC for the Buenos Aires Count Circle. The National Audubon Society started the annual tradition of a Christmas Bird Count in 1900 as a response to the earlier tradition of a Christmas "Side Hunt" where hunters tried to bring in the most quarry of birds. The bird count was to try to find the most birds in a given area in a single day. In the subsequent 116 years it has grown to over 400 "Counts" in North and South America between December 14th and January 5th. A Count is a 15-mile diameter circle (which cannot overlap with another) in which teams of birders go out for an entire day and count as many species and birds as they can find. Arizona has 36 count circles of which one is a large portion of the refuge. Massachusetts, in comparison, has 33 count circles which pretty much blanket the state, including a pelagic circle on Stellwagen Bank. Arizona has quite a bit of empty space yet, but the major birding areas are well covered.

The Buenos Aires Circle is broken up into 12 sections and a team of birders is assigned (or volunteers) to each section. We teamed up with Ron and Reta to do section 10. It is the largest section in the circle and encompasses much of the refuge south of the visitor center almost to the Mexican border. Ron is an excellent birder and he and Reta have been local volunteers at the refuge for several years and have explored much of it. They led the way and we were just the extra pair of eyes.

We spent 10 hours out in the field, covered 48 miles, traveled half of the time on foot, saw 43 species of birds and saw about 465 individual birds among the four of us. Ellen had two life birds, Crissal Thrasher (3 of them) and Black-tailed Gnatcatcher (3 of them as well).

After the count, we joined the other teams at the historic Arivaca Schoolhouse for dinner and to turn in our count sheets for tabulation. I don't know the figures yet for our circle as they haven't been published yet but Audubon reports that 403 counts have been completed for this year and in those counts, 13,187,248 birds have been counted. It is an amazing tradition and we enjoyed it enormously.

Besides the birds we saw, there were a couple of other highlights. We saw two bobcats crossing in front of us on two separate occasions; we saw a herd of 10 pronghorn on our way out in the morning—and we found two bales of marijuana.

We were walking through this arroyo and...there they were

Rob took these...the photos, that is.

We called the Border Patrol and passed them the GPS coordinates. As we were continuing down the road, a Patrol truck came zooming up. They stopped and we told them what we'd seen. They were actually responding to our call and were glad to be able to confirm our location coordinates. This was within ten minutes of calling. It was an interesting day and the marijuana surprise gave our team a special notariety.

Finally, we come to today. It was supposed to be an off day, but we'd promised Dan we'd check the birds in the flight pens. There were also two staff meetings that were scheduled and we were invited— and it rained.

It might be the start of the winter rains, where it rains steadily for an extended time. Today it was most of the day and it was fairly heavy as we checked the quail. They were no fools and in almost every pen the entire flock was huddled in one of the pen's shelters. Only a few birds were out and about. We managed to do the checking in record time and most of the birds came out for seed so I could count them, but we all got wet.

Tomorrow we hope to get into Tucson to do our shopping. We are hoping that it will not rain overnight. When the dirt roads on the refuge get wet, they get very slick and muddy, just like driving on fresh snow with packed ice underneath. We were using the refuge minivan to get around this morning and it was a bit of a challenge getting up the hill from the Outpost on its highway tires. A visitor to the refuge managed to get his car embedded up to the hubcaps just off the road right across from the visitor center and had to be pulled out by one of our law enforcement officers. Why he was here in the rain, I don't know.